An nvALT (and more) status report

I get questions every single day on Twitter and in emails asking about the status of nvALT and the commercial successor I’ve talked about. Ultimately, this post is being written so that I can have a bot send a link to something every time it sees a tweet to me with the word “nvALT” and a question mark in it.

nvALT will (probably) see one more update. We (David Halter and I) fixed the majority of bugs that cropped up with OS 10.10 almost a year ago. The source on GitHub is up to date, but we haven’t gotten around to putting out an official update. I haven’t tested it on 10.11 yet, so if there are some minor patches needed to get that smoothed out, they’ll go out with that release when it’s ready1.

The major reason for that delay, though, is that we began work on a ground-up re-imagining of nvALT. One that we could charge money for. nvALT is built on top of Notational Velocity, which is open source. Even if the license on the code allowed for commercial use, nvALT is so heavily rooted in Zachary’s original work that I wouldn’t be willing to charge for it.

David and I have both been putting in hours of development and support on nvALT for years now, and the total contributions to the project don’t add up to nearly enough to justify that. There are hundreds of thousands of users—it’s the most successful project I’ve ever posted by far, and the one on which I’ve made the least dollars per hours spent. A new commercial project has a fiery base to sell to, so we started a rapid development cycle on getting a new product that fit those same needs out.

So where’s that?

Sob story, sorry

I had planned to be in beta testing rounds this month, but I had a setback. To make a long story short, the psychiatrist I’ve been going to for about 5 years retired, then the doctor who was supposed to replace him quit his first week. I was handed off to a PA who decided very quickly that I did not have ADHD, I was suffering from depression. He cut off all of my ADHD meds and gave me Prozac.

I spent a month unable to get anything done. When I contacted him about a reevaluation, he told me to double my Prozac. That had no effect. Another month went by, as I lost all of my income and clients grew frustrated.

For the record, I’m not depressed. I’ve been bi-polar my whole life, and have experienced every degree of clinical depression. I can tell you beyond any doubt that it’s not the issue.

I managed to get a new doctor last week, which was a snafu of its own. I’m back on my previous meds, for now, and once again able to get some work done. I officially started coding on the new app (and finishing the Marked 2.5) release this week, over two months behind schedule. But it’s coming. Soon.

If the hurdles to get to 10.11 compatibility are too high, which they may be due to the age of the Notational Velocity base, there won’t be an update. Just to be clear.↩